The Book of Why: The New “Science” of Cause and Effect by Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie

I’ve sat on this review for quite some time.  Perhaps I’ve mimicked the author and made everything way too complex than it has to be.  Maybe I’ve successfully obfuscated myself.  After a couple weeks giving my brain a rest from this exhaustive and frustrating piece of sh*t book, I’ve regained my mental balance and developed a desire to be done with this review and get this horrible thing out of my mind and off my plate.  What this book has basically done is helped me relive all my intellectual nightmares from school.  What I mean to say is that, I entered school, as most kids, intensely curious, passionate, and full of awe at the spectacle of learning so much about the wonderful and seemingly magical world I lived in.  What happened instead was a grinding process, a process I call, manufactured obfuscation, mixed in equal parts with humiliation, manufactured stress, deadlines, exams, grades, records, red-marks, and the almost total annihilation of every ounce of curiosity, passion for learning, and inspiration.  Learning became a hideous, humiliating, stressful chore.  Likewise, reading this book became a hideous, stressful chore that sapped my interest in learning and reading for a couple weeks.

Why?  This book is a joke.  It feigns to argue that science has yet to invent an effective way to prove causality, the almighty ‘why’ of nature.  We understand how nature works, what it produces, but for some reason, we have not (until now) developed the tools to understand why nature does what it does.  This is all bullsh*t.  What in fact the idiot-like author is saying is that the SOCIAL “sciences” have yet to prove any causality in social phenomena.  What the author invented is not the first tool for science to use to prove causality.  Real science, thank you very much, has the tools to prove causality.  What the idiot-like author is saying is that he has invented a tool to make it look like, or make it look MORE like, the SOCIAL “sciences” can prove causality.  Well, Einstein, it can’t, because social phenomena cannot be controlled and isolated like in the real sciences.  Like quantum phenomena, the act of measuring it, inextricably alters it.  In the case of social phenomena, when you extract one social variable, by this very act, you deactivate the emergent actuators of the phenomena.  Okay, fancy talk for saying that social phenomena occur only when key social variables are mixed together, and when that occurs, they produce an emergent, new property that could not have occurred without that precise mix.  Certainly, you can make causal inferences about social phenomena.  If you release 100 serial killers into a community, murders will increase.  But you can’t make more complex and nuanced inferences like, if you increase the number of police officers by 15%, murders will decrease by 7.5%.  There are too many alternative factors and influences on murder than the number of police officers in the community.   The book review ends here.  What follows are just ideas that were spurred by this horrible book:

 

I’ve started to dwell a lot on manufactured complexity and purposeful obfuscation by social “scientists” and bureaucrats alike.  I will therefore take this opportunity to digress on the matter.

 

Manufactured Complexities and Dangers

 The modern world is becoming increasingly complex and dangerous.  It is simply becoming too large for any one person or small group of people to handle and manage.  For this reason, we need a strong, ubiquitous government to help protect people and manage the complexities of the modern world.  Constitutional rights and freedoms worked in the age of agriculture, but in the age of industry, robber barons and industrialists have become too powerful and exploited factory labor.  In exchange for rights and freedoms, a centralized powerful government can ensure that the masses are protected and coordinated in their efforts to create a just, egalitarian, and free society.

Do you believe all that crap?  Evidently, this is the logic of the expansion of government since the dawn of the Industrial Age in America.  The ruling class have always exploited people, from slavery to serfdom back to African slavery to exploitation of farm workers.  Complex societies have always existed, especially in large ports and trading cities, and they never required a heavy-handed centralized bureaucracy to manage them.  In fact, free agents and entrepreneurs were better equipped to manage the complexities of cultural diversity and trade.  Large bureaucracies were actually poorly equipped to handle the complexities of diverse populations in diverse, dynamic markets.  While complexities increase as more people interact and technology invents new inventions and tools, each individual is better at determining what is important to know, whom to interact with, and how to use and adapt these tools for their needs than distant, removed bureaucrats.  Finally, if you wanted to control the exploitation and growth of robber barons and the ruling elite, you certainly wouldn’t construct an enormous and powerful bureaucracy that can be bought and controlled by them.

Our government, however, has perpetuated the idea that the world is too complex for individuals to run their own affairs by making everything more complex, obscure, secretive, confusing, and convoluted than it has to be.  Most government workers are not actually involved in doing anything useful to help people but rather do nothing but learn, interpret, and manage the unbelievable manufactured complexities of countless laws, regulations, guidelines, and rules invented to perpetuate the idea that the world is too complex for individuals to run their own affairs.  Certainly if you pass enough laws and rules and purposefully make them exceptionally dense, convoluted, and obscure, then individuals would need to hire lawyers to run their own affairs, and that is exactly what they do if they can afford it.  If they can’t afford it, they suffer the consequences of breaking countless laws, rules, and regulations resulting in lost freedoms and privileges and impoverishment from fines, liens, or incarceration.  Instead of creating a world kinder and safer for the masses, the peasants, the poor and reeling in the rich and forcing them to redistribute their wealth to the masses, bureaucratism AKA progressivism actually makes the world a lot more brutal and unsafe for the peasants who lack lawyers to protect them and helps to redistribute wealth from everyone to the rich who can afford lawyers to navigate the manufactured complexities of the modern world.

To that end, the bureaucrat has embarked on a rather impressive journey of manufacturing complexity via widespread obfuscation, disinformation, misinformation, and data and sensory overload.  They have achieved this through inventing new fields of social “science” like Political Science, Economics, Urban Planning, Psychology, and Sociology.  In order to give them the same kind of credentials as the hard, real sciences, they have loaded these fields with advanced math, statistics, charts, formulas, studies, papers, and enough misdirecting babble and obscure jargon and acronyms to kid any ordinary citizen into believing they 1. Know what they’re talking about 2. Seem scientific enough, and 3. Deserve to run their lives for them.

Of course, in any con, the goal is not to shed light but rather to confuse, distract, lie, deceive, distort, overwhelm, and control.  If you have ever suffered a presentation by a bureaucrat or anyone with a degree in these social “sciences,” you will be immediately put to sleep, and that is exactly the point.  They are hypnotists.  Their dry, monotone, verbose, overly complex and obscure style is designed to turn off your frontal lobes where you would otherwise judge and criticize what they are saying.  Like Adolf Hitler, they then build up to an orgasmic climax of what must be done as a result of the comprehensive and exhaustive research conducted, “Yes, we must then build more roads to alleviate traffic and reduce traffic accidents!”  The audience swoons and opens their checkbooks for another incremental, boiling the frog 1/8^th-of-a-percent tax to fund more road construction.

Even worse, America has truly transformed from a society where elected officials run government to a society where bureaucrats run government, and elected officials give bureaucrats general direction or simple veto power but little else.  No elected official can ever go through all the material that bureaucrats give them to make intelligent decisions about policy, practices, and procedures.  Elected officials are inundated with information that is disorganized, lack prioritization, lack any form of structure or logic, and is specifically designed to overwhelm and confuse them (obfuscate).  Hidden deep within the overload of information are important policy and procedural changes that make huge impacts on society.

Elected officials often feel inadequate and incompetent for questioning the deluge of information and lack a sophisticated enough staff to disseminate and dissect the information or even given the time to do so.  Fact is, bureaucrats are more than capable of organizing information properly, prioritizing lists, putting important things in front and trivial administrative things in back, but what use is that to them?  Bureaucrats want to control (or gently guide) the decisions made by elected officials to benefit them, their longevity, society’s dependence on them, their very existence.  They have every incentive to obfuscate, confuse, and overwhelm elected officials so in despair and laziness, the officials endow the bureaucrats with an irresponsible level of trust and power.  On top of all this, bureaucrats intimately know how to threaten elected officials with policies and procedures that inflame and outrage the public.  For instance, when elected officials threaten to shut down government if they don’t cut spending, bureaucrats are all too happy to shut down programs that incite and outrage the public like access to parks and government buildings.  They threaten to cut off pension and social security checks first well before they even consider cutting off their own salaries and benefits.  Their funding gives bureaucrats a huge unfair advantage over elected officials with their limited staff and limited terms.  One or two-term elected officials are no competition for lifelong bureaucrats.

Meanwhile, public education does the exact same thing with children.  They overwhelm them with manufactured complexity in the most dull and monotone manner possible to put children to sleep.  Is it any wonder they need to get amped on amphetamines to stay alert?  Then when most children fail to regurgitate faithfully everything they have read and heard, they are convinced that they are simply too stupid to understand complex concepts.  The horrifying tragedy is that most children grow up believing that they are too stupid to understand the complexities of the modern world, and they are better off leaving all the details and difficult social decisions to bureaucrats who do understand everything.  Most children graduate from high school never reading another nonfiction book in their lives, and believe everything they’re fed on mainstream media which collaborates with government.  Every two or four years, they’re given a simple test to determine who will run their city, state, or country.  Brainwashed into thinking that they are too stupid to make their own minds up about complex social issues, they split the odds by picking one of two most popular candidates.  Think about it.  If the answer is A or B and never C or D, why not put down A for all your answers?  At least you’ll get 50% as opposed to 0% for C or D.

Fortunately, a group of independent thinkers and iconoclasts are doing their best to present information in the most straightforward, entertaining, simple, and clear manner possible in the form of books.  Whether they are doing this for profit, celebrity, or altruism, the effect is huge.  Those who read their books start to realize that everything they’ve been taught in public schools is obfuscation and distraction with the truth hidden here and there to establish an air of credibility.  As importantly, the way they have been taught has been inefficient, ineffective, and purposefully overwhelming, taxing and boring.  The only possible way to get straight A’s is simply to turn off your critical thinking mind and just memorize and accept everything as god’s word along with gobbling obscene amounts of amphetamines.  Straight-A students are not smarter than you and me; they’re either more gullible or more determined to do as they are told to make the most amount of money in life.  Of course, by middle age, they have an existential crisis and wonder what they’ve done with their lives, only to snap out of it by falling back on empty mass consumerism, materialism, and status-chasing.

Once you free yourself of the yoke of “the world is too complex to understand without bureaucratic supervision,” you no longer feel inadequate and intimidated by the complexities that are thrown at you by bureaucrats or academics who pride themselves in inventing obscure jargon and acronyms to make themselves feel superior.  You realize the gimmick and the con.  You are not stupid for not being able to understand what they are saying.  You simply know that they are being dishonestly and purposefully dense and obfuscating, manufacturing complexities to hide things just like a Collateralized Debt Obligation salesperson.  You then simply ignore them and pursue knowledge from more honest sources who can better convey their knowledge concisely, colorfully, and clearly.  These are the people who are excited about knowledge and truly interested in spreading it with everyone freely (or at least for the cost of a book).  Bureaucrats are guarded with what little they know, because they are afraid of revealing what little they know, so they bombard you with copious misdirecting data, facts, figures, formulas, charts, diagrams, citations, notes, appendices, papers, words, and numbers.  Keep in mind, the stupidest person in the room says the most, an overcompensation for knowing the least.  Remember English class?  The clear, concise essay that addresses one of the book’s themes creatively and intelligently, but does not necessarily prove that you read the entire book always gets a B while the rambling, nonsensical bullsh*t essay that throws in dozens of quotes from the book supposedly proving that you read and comprehended it, gets the A.  Schools create regurgitating automatons not creative thinkers.

In a bureaucracy, if you believe that the goal is to provide a service and help the public, nothing makes sense and nothings gets done.  Resistance will accumulate everywhere, and you will find yourself labeled a rabble-rouser or trouble-maker.  However, if you simply relent to the idea that the goal is to obfuscate, misdirect, and perpetuate the idea that the world is too complex for individuals to manage without government, then everything starts to make sense and everything is achieved to these ends.  You embark on adding to the volumes of regulations and restrictions, increasing the complexity and obscurity of reports and procedures, and you are rewarded by your superiors who have no idea what you’re talking about but know that if it confused the hell out of them, it will confuse the hell out of the public.

The world has truly become a dangerous and dark place, but not because of industrialism or urbanization but rather the proliferation of large, powerful, centralized bureaucracies that peddle in lies, deception, self-preservation, and manufactured complexity and crises.  Their whole premise is that we need them, because the world is dangerous and dark and complex, so what better way to ensure your existence and relevance than making the world increasingly dangerous, dark, and complex?  Fortunately, the Information Age is all about uncovering information and in a sort of natural selection sort of way, using the most clear, concise, and simple way to convey or understand that information.  What we are slowly discovering is the biggest con ever perpetrated in human history, the notion that we need a special ruling class empowered with a powerful bureaucracy to run our lives, because we are too stupid or evil to run our lives on our own.

An insidious byproduct of manufacturing complexity is the realization that you can actually better understand people and social dynamics if you take away their freedom and independence, if you basically treat them like objects and control them as you would objects in a truly scientific experiment.  In fact, government-sponsored and controlled social “science” research does exactly this by inflicting incarcerated people with horrific experiments.  What better way to control an experiment than use imprisoned people who have much more limited interfering variables in their lives.  In fact, this is exactly where government is herding us, into pigeonhole corrals so that it may better control us.  It does this by labeling us and dividing us but also by simply taking away our freedoms and independence which are the source of our complexities, unpredictability, and individual ingenuity and creativity.  In a world of mindless, brainwashed automatons, government has a much easier job of controlling, managing, and predicting social behavior.  Instead of reality driving research and then social policy, social policy drives the research and then the reality.

 

https://www.amazon.com/Book-Why-Science-Cause-Effect-ebook/dp/B075CR9QBJ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1534403416&sr=8-1&keywords=the+book+of+why

 

The New Tycoons: Inside the Trillion Dollar Private Equity Industry That Owns Everything by Jason Kelly

Follow the money.  Eisenhower spoke of a menacing “military-industrial complex” that profited from war, and today, post 9/11, we live in a perpetual state of war against terrorism with a $700 billion annual defense budget not including perpetual trillion-dollar wars and discretionary funding.  So who is exactly behind the military-industrial complex?  The answer is simply, follow the money.  Unfortunately, with private companies, you can’t follow the money, and this is rather problematic, especially when the largest owners of defense stocks are private investment or asset management companies.  They may also be publicly traded companies and banks, but then who owns these companies and banks but yet more private asset management companies.  I’m pretty sure, if there were a secretive ruling class that are far richer than Jeff Bezos, they wouldn’t have made it so easy to track them down.  So the ultimate answer is this, possibilities: A. what we are led to believe.  The richest man alive is Jeff Bezos.  The richest people only have as much influence as they have contributed to political parties and politicians.  There is no secret cabal or cartel of ruling elite whether the rich or a deep state bureaucratic apparatus and works in the shadows.  B. the other extreme.  A secret cabal of ruling elite in collusion perhaps with a deep state bureaucratic apparatus that puts politicians in their place if they fail to be subtly nudged with campaign contributions.  If the owners of all the private companies were revealed, they would be revealed to own much of the wealth of this planet.  The veal would be removed.  The fact divulged, we are all their servants.  Our productivity and wealth is undermined by their monopolistic control of the economy and plutocratic control of the world’s most powerful countries.  Or C. something in between.

 Unfortunately, this book reveals no hidden elite cabal but rather just another wrinkle in the games played by high finance and banking.  Unfortunately, I was not aware of the rather major difference between private equity companies and private asset management companies.  Private asset management companies may offer mutual funds or have private equity divisions, but these are the ones you’ll often see in the top ten owners of major corporations and banks, over and over and over.  BlackRock manages $6.3 trillion in wealth according to Wikipedia.  Well whose wealth is that?  This book answers this partially in pointing to sovereign wealth funds that are state-owned investment funds, often from cash-rich, resource-rich countries like Abu Dhabi, China, and Kuwait.  A big source of funds also comes from public pensions.  In a sense, the mindless bureaucrats who perpetuate the corrupt statist system that colludes with big business and big banks, accumulate retirement wealth that contributes further to the wealth of the rich through big business and big bank investments. 

 This book does a really good job of offering a glimpse into the history and workings of a few private equity firms and then sprinkles in explanations of how private equity works and the controversy they have drawn, due in large part from Mitt Romney’s Presidential bid and his own dealings working for a private equity firm.  Detractors accuse private equity of being blood-sucking financial engineers who add nothing to productivity and economic growth while cutting jobs, saddling a struggling company with debt (dividend recapitalization), and then selling it off with a profit.  This sounds like the subplot of Pretty Woman which was actually a shadow metaphor for prostitution.  Instead of taking advantage of a struggling young lady and extracting from her short-term gain, undermining her long-term value, why not make her an honest lady and marry her? 

 The book is a bit less biased and offers positives as well.  In one cited study, jobs were added in service sector companies and cut in retail companies.  Unlike corporations, private equity has a ten-year term for investments and sells companies after five years of working on them, often transforming them into huge cash-cows with the infusion of money and expertise.  They certainly benefit the owners of private equity companies as the income is taxed lower as carried interest, a point of controversy.  I’d say the reality is somewhere in between.  Not all private equity companies are saints, and not all are financially engineering demons either. 

* * *

 I’ve always considered corporations as vultures.  They take an idea, a brand that has gained surprisingly fast success, they infuse it with a huge amount of money to expand nationally and perhaps internationally.  However, in the process, they have a team of demented operational wonks whose job it is to extract every single ounce of value from the product or service while retaining sufficient customers to return a profit on the huge investment to expand the company.  In other words, early adopters get the real-deal often at a bargain, and this is usually why the product became so popular so quickly.  Late adopters get an ethereal mirage of the original product, something that slightly tastes or looks like the original but that has every ounce of value extracted to maximize profits and minimize cost.  The fat cat owner who sold his company and went public bitches and whines, as scripted, distances himself from the current product that has very little resemblance to his creation, and slowly, more and more consumers catch on to the bait and switch, and the corporation slowly dies off.  However, this is not always the case.  Sometimes, a smart eye can find a corporation that still has legs.  There’s still some big money-making opportunity, and that brand is the key, you already have a huge audience, you just need to make a few updates, trendy tweaks, maybe some online presence, and voila, you can transform a struggling corporation before it dies completely.  In a sort of twisted way, you can think of private equity as Bar Rescue, except that Jon Taffer actually buys the bar and then sells it for a profit. 

 In a totally fair and level playing field, there should be no problem with companies borrowing huge sums of money to outright buy large companies, restructure them, refinance them, and turn a huge profit.  I get the feeling that most Americans are being sold this version as a sort of American dream thing.  Anyone can do it, why outlaw it?  You must hate Capitalism and America if you don’t like this.  The problem is, it’s not a fair and level playing field, and no, not anybody can do it.  This book points out that the makers and shakers are all about connections, and how exactly do you make connections?  This is where the unfairness begins.  Rich people associate with rich people, and rich kids associate with rich kids, and rich and smart kids generally go to the same Ivy League schools where they join frats and secret societies like Skull and Bones, where they make life-long connections with other rich and smart kids.  Rich and smart kids start off with an incredible advantage in life. 

 Then you argue, well, it’s not impossible for a poor and smart kid to make it big, there’s proof like Oprah and Richard Branson.  Well, the exception doesn’t make the norm, and when you’re talking about fair and level playing fields, we’re talking about what the norm is for a group of people.  If Group A starts at the starting line and Group B starts 50% closer to the finish line, just because one out of every million in Group A somehow was fast enough to win a few times, doesn’t make it okay for Group B to start 50% closer to the finish line.  As the book notes so well, private equities have unfair advantages and less oversight than public companies and investment banks.  In fact, the bigger and more wealthy a person or company is, the more advantages they get, lower taxes, lower interest rates, larger loans, better terms, subsidies, loopholes, more influential connections, more political clout, and as noted in a great book called Superhubs, when you’re at the top, everyone wants to make a favorable deal with you.  The last one is important, because you can also argue that people love lotteries.  People love the idea of pooling their money and then someone, however, improbable, becomes a deca or even centi-millionaire.  This is not a good analogy, because the playing field is not level and fair.  Imagine if a rich kid could buy a PowerBall for $2, but instead of one play, he gets one thousand sets of numbers played.  Imagine if the poor kid only gets one set of numbers for $2.  Imagine if it wasn’t even voluntary.  That’s the problem with this lottery system.  The real lottery is voluntary and everyone gets one play per ticket, an equal chance per dollar spent.  With the state taxation and political influence lottery, everyone is forced to play, and the richer and more powerful you are, the better chances you have of winning the lottery. 

* * * 

One of the more unfortunate parts of the book is when they mention a chief operating officer who brings Lean management into the leadership circles.  I’ve studied and been victim to Lean Sigma Six, the whole bullfuckery of management “science.”  It is 99% window dressing, the aura and optic of being productive and progressive when in fact, it is nothing but smoke and mirrors, a theatrical performance intended to give everyone the impression that you are applying hard scientific methods and techniques to managing a business, so that much like a scientific inquiry, you wind up discovering undeniable facts like Division B is wasting $17.34 million in cost by using Cog F35a when it should be using Cog F35b.  It ignores the fact that some low-level technician knew this all along and had tried several times unsuccessfully to bring it to the attention of management until the Lean bullfuckery machine asked him and then via the Lean process improvement analysis, management was reminded of this and had an excuse to implement the change. 

 Now, you go, aha, so Lean actually did have a positive impact.  Well, yes and no.  Any outside consultant can help a deaf management team listen to technicians who can save the company millions, often times, that’s their entire point of existence, but the question is at what cost?  In my opinion, the difference with Lean is that the cost often outweighs any misperceived and misattributed benefits.  Lean focuses on quantitative data and ignores the more impactful and meaningful qualitative information that cannot be quantified or measured, or in a rather quantum way undermines people’s imagination and productivity when you start measuring them.  Imagination and morale have a much greater impact on a company’s bottom line than any quantifiable data.  Often times, we agree with this notion but only at the very top level.  We all agree that Apple or even Amazon benefited from the imagination and unrelenting drive and motivation of Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos.  But then we totally discount how imagination and unrelenting drive and motivation has any impact at all on every other employee in their company right down to their janitors.  It’s almost as if we’re saying, all a company needs is one guy with imagination and unrelenting passion, and he can just bully everyone else into being productive.  Um, no.  The funny thing about Lean Sigma Six is that it is rarely ever inflicted upon senior management.  They are above scrutiny and process improvements unless, literally in my case, they’re helping senior management clean up their offices.  Lean Sigma Six is often inflicted upon the front line, to a lesser effect middle management, and rarely with senior management.  It’s as if to say, we don’t expect workers down the pyramid structure to be motivated by imagination or passion, so we’ll just rely on micro-managing them to death.  My company literally created a process improvements flow chart for making coffee.  Furthermore, Lean Sigma Six almost always ignores social dynamics.  Often problems, waste, and bottle-necks can be eliminated simply by bringing key people from disparate departments or divisions together and then getting key executives to buy off their process improvement.  This rarely ever happens.  So-called black belt consultants almost rarely bring people together and more often single people out and silo them to better control the creation of flow charts, perpetuating the exact problem that creates problems, waste, and bottle-necks in the first place.

* * * 

One interesting side piece of this book is how wealthy and prominent people, or wealthy people trying to be more prominent, give away their money and chair very prestigious charitable trusts.  Us poor urchins only get to view these trusts when we watch PBS and at the end of the program, they tell us which trusts funded the programming.  While the biased market that produces billionaires reallocates wealth from all of us through taxes and our corporate consumption, into the hands of a few people, we then must ask, well how do they spend their money as opposed to how would we have spent our money?  The answer is quite simple.  The super wealthy spend more money where they live, so in essence, Manhattan and Vale, Colorado, get more of their bread crumbs than say Lubbock, Texas or Mobile, Alabama.  In other words, wealth becomes concentrated in wealth communities, either elite resort cities or the financial centers of the world.  But buying a Snickers bar in a bodega in Upper East Side Manhattan instead of a gas station in Mobile is not a big wealth redistribution thing.  When the super wealthy give away their money to charity, most of that charity stays local too.  In other words, the big cities of the world and America have concentrated cultural amenities provided in large part by both a higher tax base and also a much higher concentration of charities.  In a sense, not only are we redistributing wealth from all of us to a few lucky communities where the fat, rich bastards happen to work, but we are also redistributing a large chunk of culture, entertainment, talent, art, sports, etc.  In other words, not only are all American communities being financially impoverished by income inequality and the concentration of wealth in big cities, but they are being culturally impoverished too.  Worse off, people in big cities commit a false attribute error.  They go, look how impoverished middle America is both financially and culturally, this shows you what an inherent failure their economy and culture is.  No, not at all.  What it shows you is what happens when we create an uneven and unfair playing field and allow wealth to collect and pool in lucky concentrated communities. 

  

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B008KPMBIG/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

 

 

Losing Our Shit

It’s not a book review, sometimes I just like to write.  

Control is a funny thing.  We instinctively enjoy the feeling of autonomy, especially when the going gets tough.  Our DNA has given us this bias so that we avoid serving the interests of other animals and other variations of DNA.  When another animal tries to control us, it often tries to control us in order that we serve them and their DNA.  Our DNA, over a process of evolution, figured out that it is better to desire feelings of autonomy and freedom to ensure that we are not serving someone else’s DNA.  However, our DNA also learned through a process of evolution, that by working together with animals that are more closely related, in this new work group, all our DNA has a better chance of being passed on, and hence the social instinct is passed on.  Unfortunately, humans have put a rather sick and evil twist on this.  A small group of humans have found a way to convince the larger, greater number of humans to serve them through indoctrination and the infliction of trauma.

 Trauma occurs when two conditions are met.  First, we undergo a sustained or highly intense aversive stimulation, i.e., horrible pain or suffering.  Second, we don’t feel like we are in control of the situation and have many options to utilize.  I.e., we feel trapped.  When people undergo sustained or a highly intense pain or suffering, but they felt like they were in control and had options, they do not suffer trauma.  They do not suffer the same intensity of emotions and recurring negative memories of that event.  It does not traumatize them. 

 Not only do we enjoy the feeling of autonomy or freedom, we are repulsed and turned off by feelings of losing control.  A lot of people fear doing psychedelics, because they fear losing control of their freedom and autonomy for an hour or more.  A lot of people fear drinking until they black out for the same reasons.  However, there are a group of people who do not.  They are people who suffer PTSD.  This is also why doing hard drugs which lead people to lose control are appealing to people with PTSD. 

 People who suffer PTSD are drawn to losing control for two reasons.  First, they fear it less.  They have a frame of reference however negative.  Remember, we fear the unknown more than the known, even if the known is traumatic and unappealing.  People with PTSD are thinking, “Well, it didn’t kill me the first time, so I think I can handle it again.”  As slaves to our DNA and animals struggling to adapt to our specific habitats, once we suffer trauma, we develop a rather twisted and unfortunate knack for handling trauma and even in a sick and twisted way, seeking it, playing with it, revisiting it, and attempting to conquer it. 

 Second, as the most socialized beings on the planet, we are mimicking machines.  Monkey see, monkey do is a lot more accurate of humans than monkeys.  To a much greater extent, monkeys follow their natural instincts over learned behavior while humans mimic each other more than follow their natural instincts.  Unfortunately, when humans are traumatized, we seek out experiences that will mimic the feelings of losing control under negative circumstances.  American teenagers and young adults who have very little control over their own lives, who are led down a path of ambition, good grades, conformity, and obedience, are not rebelling by binge drinking on the weekends and losing control.  Rather, they are simply mimicking the traumatic feelings of not being in control of their lives as negative circumstances arise.  For many it means binge drinking while for others it might mean binge eating, binge shopping, binge athletics, binge Netflix, binge social media, etc.  What they are doing is seeking, playing with, and revisiting the trauma of losing their autonomy and freedom, especially at an age when their craving for autonomy and freedom peaks. 

 The most unfortunate side-effect, if you can imagine there is something worse than becoming addicted to drugs, alcohol, food, shopping, or social media, is losing autonomy and freedom and being traumatized also causes us to mimic this feeling with our social relationships.  In other words, when dealing with other people, instead of trusting them and giving them autonomy and freedom, we attempt to control them and make them obey us.  We inflict upon them the experiences we suffered from our trauma.  Human see, human do.  There is nothing more destructive to relationships besides outright abuse.  Again, we are naturally aversive to losing autonomy and freedom, so we tend to distrust and dislike those who threaten our autonomy and freedom.  But remember, we’re also mimicking machines, so in a sick and twisted way, we are concurrently drawn towards and attracted to people who threaten our autonomy and freedom and feel that people who trust us and give us our autonomy and freedom are foreign and strange to us. 

 Another sick and twisted side-effect is that our political beliefs tend to mimic our personal and social attitudes.  In other words, we don’t trust a system that trusts us.  We are not familiar with a system that encourages our autonomy and freedom.  Rather, we are much more familiar with and yes, traumatized by, a system that undermines our autonomy and freedom, a system we have grown to love in a sick and twisted way, an oppressive, authoritarian system that inculcates and demands obedience and conformity.  Like a lover who is controlling and abusive, there is something strangely familiar and comforting about them, while a lover who is trusting and caring is something we find strange, unusual, and untrustworthy.

 The old, twisted notion that civilization is all about progress, that we are somehow becoming increasingly autonomous and free and happy and social beings is actually all a big deception.  Civilization is all about losing autonomy and freedom.  In the past, our rulers have convinced us that in exchange for our autonomy and freedom, we are given the stick of death and punishment and the carrot of wealth and power.  Of course, civilization has always been a Ponzi scheme, and only a very few have access to wealth and power.  In fact, for all civilized history, the vast majority of humans have been nothing but slaves and servants.  While servants are given much more freedoms than slaves, the illusion of freedom has a heavy price with inflated costs of living which put us into debt which we must pay off by working harder.  While we may believe that we are free and working harder to pay off debts to afford nicer things, we are only slightly better off than the slave who is simply forced to work hard in exchange for free food and board, a much lower cost of living. 

 PTSD causes us to lose our shit constantly, to surrender to our impulses and fears and relive that moment of trauma we initially suffered and the countless moments we felt little in control while suffering the hardships of obedience and conformity.  We lose our shit in traffic, while waiting in long lines, or getting shitty service.  We have become a nation of impatient, petty, angry, out-of-control, binging, addicting whiney infantile automatons.  Losing control also means losing control of our judgment and higher faculties which makes us even more vulnerable to the subliminal messages of both the state and private sector.  The state tries to sell us a bundle of fear to make us pay higher taxes and surrender greater liberties.  The private sector tries to sell us a bundle of temptations to make us buy useless shit and surrender greater privacy.  The state tries to make us lose our shit by overwhelming us with fear while the private sector tries to make us lose our shit by overwhelming us with endless, well-staged temptations.  Between fearing terrorism, homelessness, drugs, and traffic and desirous of being trendy, popular, rich, and cool, we agree to surrender our freedoms and obey and conform.  Unfortunately, we neither achieve security or popularity, because they are just mirages used to control our behavior and make us work harder and get into more debt and pay more taxes.  In the end, what we actually become is the complete opposite of what we thought we were becoming.  In the end, we become neurotic, obsessive, anxious, depressed, out-of-control, binging, addicted, anti-social, unpopular, even more fearful and insecure, petty, whiney, infantile automatons that love losing our shit over meaningless things so that we can have the twisted pleasure of reliving our every trauma. 

Unfortunately, when we try to regain control of our addictions, binging, diet, health, finances, relationships, career, whatever, we go overboard in the wrong direction.  When we find that we are losing control of whatever, we tend to want to micro-manage and being overly controlling of that thing.  We count calories, we impose a strict diet regime, a strict workout regime, we count pennies, we cut coupons, we fast, we go cold turkey, we become misers, and even worse, we becoming overly controlling over people in our lives, going over their faults with a fine-toothed comb trying to make them the better person we fail to be.  It all backfires gloriously upon us, like a bomb going off on a cartoon villain.  We continue to fail to recognize that we don’t change our behavior by trying to micro-manage and control it.  This is nothing more than another form of the same disease, reacting to oppression and authoritarianism by becoming oppressive and authoritarian over ourselves.  What we actually need to do is become more trusting of ourselves, to lengthen that leash, but concurrently be around people who are trusting and not controlling.  Remember, human see, human do, we are the most faithfully mimicking machines in the animal kingdom.  If you want to change human behavior, put them in a room with people whose behavior you want to mimic.  Of course, this is all easier said than done, and in today’s society, where the hell do you find such people?  The only good source I know of are books.  Other than that, whatever the hell you do, avoid controlling people like the plague.  No, they’re not inexplicably attractive, familiar, and cute; rather, they’re disgusting, untrustworthy, and mentally twisted, and you’ll become just like them if you hang around them.